On the Development of a Reconfigurable Platform for the Control of Multiple Collaborative Robots from a Software Engineering Perspective

The development of an efficient method to control multiple robots is a critical step to realizing collaborative tasks which, in the era of Industry 4.0, play a significant role in smart flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). In current literature, there have been several attempts to control collaborative robots, but the large majority of the reported works are based on complex and expensive control models. The remainder tend to have approached the problem from the less expensive software engineering perspective. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, most of the studies following the latter approach have been simulations, omitting practical real-world validation. This paper reports the findings obtained while addressing this problem utilizing two strategies, a simulation-based technique and a native software method. Following the systematic implementation of both scenarios, a native algorithm-based platform was developed to control multiple Panda robots in independent, dependent and collaborative ways. The developed platform has demonstrated its capability to control four collaborative Panda robots along with their “OnRobot” grippers in both a synchronized and an asynchronous manner to perform challenging assembly tasks. In addition, the platform is capable of acquiring and transmitting the real-time states of the robots, i.e., joints angle values during motion, to a third-party systems or database for visualization and future corrective actions. Additionally, the robot can recover from collision errors via a software reset without the need for a hard-reset. Finally, it is worth stating that the developed platform is reconfigurable and able to incorporate additional types and numbers of robots into the existing smart flexible system.